Christopher McQuarrie Says Next Two ‘Mission: Impossible’ Movies Will Be Big Enough to ‘Swallow’ the Last Three

Although we cover other movies and television shows at ScreenCrush, you should know that if we could, we would only write about the Mission: Impossible franchise. (My boss wasn’t enamored with the idea of changing the name of the site to MissionCrush, but I’m still working on him.) We’re basically just a very carefully disguised Ethan Hunt fan site. FYI.

Today MissionCrush brings you an interview from Empire with Mission: Impossible writer/director/mastermind Christopher McQuarrie who is now prepping two more Mission movies that will shoot back-to-back. He told Empire that these movies need to be big enough to justify their existence — which means they will be way bigger than the last three films. (For the record, those were movies where Tom Cruise climbed the tallest building in the world, hung on to the side of a flying plane, and dangled from the bottom of a helicopter.)

His description:

I pitched the idea of making two movies, and now I have to justify why it’s two movies. You’ve got to earn that. You’ve got to make something that swallows the last three movies whole. I’m freaked out now. We’ve talked ourselves into something. Holy s—.

So far so good, but there is some bad news too. McQuarrie shot down the idea, which should be inevitable at this point, that Cruise go into outer space to fight, I dunno, space crime or whatever. “Here’s the problem with going to the moon,” McQuarrie said, “how do you fall from the moon?”

With due respect to Mr. McQuarrie, who I think is maybe the best filmmaker in the big-scale action game right now, he doesn’t need to fall from the moon. He only needs to run on the moon. And in low gravity, that would look hilarious. Mission: Impossible 7 and 8 are due in theaters in the summer of 2021 and 2022.